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Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright DBE FRS FRSE (17 December 1900 – 3 April 1998)[1] was a British mathematician. She was one of the pioneers of what would later become known as chaos theory.[2] Along with J. E. Littlewood, Cartwright saw many solutions to a problem which would later be seen as an example of the butterfly effect.

Early life and education

Mary Cartwright (far right) at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1932.

Mary Cartwright was born on 17 December 1900, in Aynho, Northamptonshire, where her father William Digby was vicar. Through her grandmother Jane Holbech, she descended from poet John Donne and William Mompesson, Vicar of Eyam.[3][4] She had four siblings, two older and two younger: John (born 1896), Nigel (born 1898), Jane (born 1905), and William (born 1907).[5] Her early education was at Leamington High School (1912–1915), and then at Gravely Manor School in Boscombe (1915–1916) before completion in Godolphin School in Salisbury (1916–1919).[6]

Cartwright studied mathematics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1923 with a first class degree. She was the first woman to attain the final degree lectures and to obtain a first. She briefly taught at Alice Ottley School in Worcester and Wycombe Abbey School in Buckinghamshire before returning to Oxford in 1928 to read for her D.Phil. Cartwright was supervised by G. H. Hardy in her doctoral studies. During the academic year 1928–9 Hardy was at Princeton, so it was E. C. Titchmarsh who took over the duties as a supervisor. Her thesis “The Zeros of Integral Functions of Special Types” was examined by J. E. Littlewood, whom she met for the first time as an external examiner in her oral examination for that 1930 D.Phil.[4]

In 1930, Cartwright was awarded a Yarrow Research Fellowship and went to Girton College, Cambridge to continue working on the topic of her doctoral thesis. Attending Littlewood’s lectures, she solved one of the open problems which he posed. Her mathematical theorem, now known as Cartwright’s theorem, gives an estimate for the maximum modulus of an analytic function that takes the same value no more than p times in the unit disc. To prove the theorem she used a new approach, applying a technique introduced by Lars Ahlfors for conformal mappings.[7][8] While at Cambridge Cartwright attended the mathematical lectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein.[9]

Career

Throughout her career, Cartwright wrote over ninety articles on several different mathematical concepts. Her contributions extended to topics such as the Dirichlet series, Abel summation, directions of Borel spreads, analytic functions regular on the unit disk, the zeros of integral functions, maximum and minimum moduli, and functions of finite order in an angle.[8]

In 1936, Cartwright became director of studies in mathematics at Girton College. In 1938, she began work on a new project which had a major impact on the direction of her research. The Radio Research Board of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research produced a memorandum regarding certain differential equations which came out of modelling radio and radar work.[10] They asked the London Mathematical Society if they could help find a mathematician who could work on these problems and she became interested. The dynamics lying behind the problems were unfamiliar to Cartwright, so she approached Littlewood for help with this aspect. They began to collaborate studying the equations, in particular the Van der Pol oscillator, which greatly surprised the two:

Recognition

Cartwright was the first woman:

In 1968, Cartwright became the first woman to receive the De Morgan Medal, the highest award of the London Mathematical Society,[18][19] and was elected an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE).[20] In 1969, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.[21]

In 2026, she was honored with a blue plaque placed at her former home on 38 Sherlock Close in Cambridge.[22][23]

Death

Cartwright died in Midfield Lodge Nursing Home in Cambridge in 1998.[6]

Publications

  • Cartwright, M. L. (1962). Integral functions. Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. University Press, Cambridge. OCLC 8697638.
  • Cartwright, M. L. (1964). “From Non-Linear Oscillations to Topological Dynamics”. Journal of the London Mathematical Society. s1-39 (1). Wiley: 193–201. doi:10.1112/jlms/s1-39.1.193. ISSN 0024-6107.

References

  1. ↑ “Obituary: Mary Cartwright”. The Times. 1998.
  2. ↑ Freeman J. Dyson, Mary Lucy Cartwright (1900–1998): Chaos theory, pp. 169–177, in Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics, edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams, 498 p. (Cambridge University Press, 2006); ISBN 0-521-82197-5
  3. ↑ Mary Cartwright at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. 1 2 3 O’Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., “Mary Cartwright”, MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
  5. 1 2 3 O’Connor, J. J.; Robertson, E. F. “Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright”. School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews. Retrieved 3 April 2019.
  6. 1 2 “Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002” (PDF). Royalsoced.org.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 20 December 2015.
  7. ↑ DeFuria, Jack (22 October 2014). “Mary Lucy Cartwright”. Prezi. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  8. 1 2 3 McMurran, Shawnee; Tattersall, James (February 1999). “Mary Cartwright” (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 46.
  9. ↑ McGuinness, Brian, ed. (2012). Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911 – 1951. John WIley & Sons. p. 207.
  10. 1 2 “A Point of View: Mary, queen of maths”. BBC News Magazine. 8 March 2013.
  11. ↑ Littlewood, John Edensor (30 October 1986). Bollobás, Béla (ed.). Littlewood’s Miscellany. Cambridge New York Port Chester [etc.]: Cambridge University Press. p. 13. ISBN 0-521-33702-X.
  12. 1 2 “Mistress of Girton whose mathematical work formed the basis of chaos theory”. Obituaries Electronic Telegraph. 11 April 1998. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  13. 1 2 Walter Hayman (1 November 2000). “Dame Mary (Lucy) Cartwright, D.B.E. 17 December 1900 – 3 April 1998”. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 46: 19–35. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1999.0070. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
  14. ↑ Jeffreys, Harold (13 December 1973). Scientific Inference (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 268. ISBN 0-521-08446-6.
  15. 1 2 Hayman, Walter K. (2000). “Dame Mary (Lucy) Cartwright, D.B.E. 17 December 1900 – 3 April 1998: Elected F.R.S. 1947”. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 46: 19. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1999.0070.
  16. 1 2 “Cartwright, Dame Mary Lucy (1900–1998), mathematician | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/69671. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  17. ↑ Williams, Mrs. E. M. (October 1966), “Presidential Address: The Changing Role of Mathematics in Education”, The Mathematical Gazette, 50 (373): 243–254, doi:10.2307/3614669, JSTOR 3614669, S2CID 186846165
  18. 1 2 “Prizes, Awards, and Honors for Women Mathematicians”. mathwomen.agnesscott.org.
  19. ↑ List of LMS prize winners, LMS website, accessed July 2011
  20. ↑ “Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright Hon FRSE”. The Royal Society of Edinburgh. 28 October 2016. Retrieved 23 March 2019.
  21. ↑ “A Point of View: Mary, queen of maths”. 8 March 2013 – via www.bbc.com.
  22. ↑ https://delancey.com/blue-plaque-to-pioneering-mathematician-mary-cartwright-at-her-former-home-in-cambridge/>
  23. ↑ “Blue plaque honours pioneering female mathematician”. Yahoo News. 12 June 2026.